I’ve been working on series of parking enforcement products using license plate recognition technology called EasyALPR.
Several years ago I was working on a privacy and crypto-currency application, Gliph. Apparently, this was the first venture-funded crypto-startup because we raised our first round prior to Coinbase.
That company did not make it, so with funding from some of my previous investors, I started another one.
This time I flipped privacy on its head by building a live video streaming application. Any old smartphone becomes a webcam.
That product concept, Perch, was real art: see-all-the-things type stuff. The world in a fishbowl. Police action, puppies, perpetrators, you name it all live and archived in high definition. I go into more details in this EasyALPR company blog entry.
The tech was sweet, beat Facebook Live. Beat Twitch Clips by months. But the concept was too artsy, and too expensive to operate. I shuttered that product but kept the company.
When a user caught some perpetrators at a gas station in Oakland on Perch I stumbled again on the power of LPR. Ya, it only took me five years to come around worrying about it to working on it.
I did consider building some more scan-all-the-things type stuff as I explored five years ago on this blog. But I am not into that whole vibe really.
I am trying to focus with this product and so far it has been terrific for patrolling parking lots. So I’ve become interested in parking even though I don’t own a car.
It is really about automation and putting away manual processes. It has a license plate recognition app you can download free from the App Store, and a web application that does a lot of cool stuff too.
I explore that some in this entry on ALPR databases and more.
Not the most artistic idea in the world, but I built most of the product entirely myself, and I’m pretty happy with it so far. I have two product releases out so far, Parking Hero and Parking Defender. I have another, new one, in beta right now.